Robert Keable

“ Paul had come into King's Parade with his friends a new man. A light had fallen on his ways, and at first, as always, he had been blissfully ignorant of the bitter that lurks in all earth's sweets. He had been ignorant for about as long as it took him to walk to the post office. There, when Donaldson had said that there was no good his sending a telegram, he had seen real envy in the eyes of a friend, and when the clerk had read the flimsy paper without the flicker of an eyebrow, had realised that the world is mighty big and cares nothing. ”

“ One night he had awakened in his hut, and had seen a white man standing before him dressed in a black robe, a string of beads, and carrying a book. Behind the white man he could see, as it were, the vision of a town, a river, a precipice—in short, what he now saw to have been Mtakatifuni. The figure had beckoned him solemnly, and he had sat up in his bed in fear. It had beckoned again, and had then pointed north and east, and at that the vision had died away before the startled sleeper’s eyes. But Mwezi understood. ”

“ At last the chatter of the place broke in on Peter. "My dear," he exclaimed, "one can see it. But what do you do there?"
She laughed and broke the spell. "What would one do?" she demanded. "Eat and drink and sleep, and make love, Peter, if there's anybody to make love to."
"But you couldn't do that all your life," he objected.
"Why not? Why do anything else? I never can see. And when you're tired—for you do get tired at last—back to Durban for a razzle-dazzle, or back farther still, to London or Paris for a bit. That's the life for me, Peter!" ”

“ Father Vassall had quoted the words once, with his little stammer that somehow did away with all suspicion of effeminacy. The specks of light ceased to dance before Paul's closed eyes. It was as if he was in a very wide room. He grew still. His mind settled down to the great question. Did God really will that men should come to Him that way? What if he took a step forward? "Faith is a step in the dark." In the dark? But this was light! That glare over the footlights, that searching limelight, that had been darkness. ”

“ He had looked down with the rest, across the footlights, into that Eastern street where passers by came and went, and mules and asses, where a radiant sun shone blindingly, where tall white houses and the gaudy booths of merchants filled the scene; but he had a sudden odd sense of Chanctonbury and dark pines and the cool mellow wind, and a feeling that the beggar-man had no place there. Yet the beggar-man was duly at his corner crouching in the dust, whining, shrinking from the Pharisee's robe, the merchant's stick. Paul found himself staring with aroused interest—his blind beggar-man! ”

“ One could imagine that the distant cathedral brooding over the city heard, saw, and spoke, if in another language than the language of men.
"If that were all, Langton," said Peter suddenly, "I'd shoot myself."
"You're a queer fellow, Graham," said Langton. "I almost think you might. I'd like to know what becomes of you, anyway. Forgive me—I don't mean to be rude—but you may make a parson yet. But don't found a new religion for Heaven's sake, and don't muddle up man-made laws and God-made instincts—if they are God-made," he added. ”

“ I turned and saw him standing in the doorway, his hand on the mud wall for support, his eyes peering at me from his bowed head. If I had been momentarily suspicious of a knowledge hitherto kept from me, all fled at the sight of him. He was transparently honest and eager. ‘What is it, white man?’ he quavered.
“‘Mwezi,’ said I, ‘here is a strange thing and a wonder. You tell me that you saw in your vision a white man, and I know from what you say that he was a priest. You travelled far, and your spirit sent you here. ”

“ Ursula was sitting up in bed reading, her hair about her, her thin silk nightdress exposing her shoulders and neck. In the bunk above, Muriel, on her side, covered with a sheet, only half awake, opened her eyes sleepily.
It is odd how moments of understanding come in life, not to be hurried, not to be gainsaid. Paul Kestern had travelled with these two for some days now with all their opportunities of intimacy, and in her own flat he had seen Ursula Manning robed for the evening or making a belated breakfast even more revealingly dressed than now. ”

“ On the right bank the flat plain of Normandy stretches to the sky-line, pink-and-white in spring with miles of apple-orchards. The white clouds chase across its fair blue sky, driven by the winds from the sea, and tall poplars rise in their uniform rows along the river as if to guard a Paradise.
Caudebec can be reached from Le Havre in a few hours, and although cars for hire and petrol were not abundant in France at the time, one could find a chauffeur to make the journey if one was prepared to pay. Given fine weather, it was an ideal place for a day off in the spring. And Peter knew it. ”

“ Did you hear him, Julie? Christ comes in between—He got in between God and man. All the anger that darted out of God against sin hit Him; all the blows that man struck back against God hit Him. Do you see that, Julie? That was wonderfully put, but the end was more wonderful. Both, ultimately, cannot kill the Heart of Jesus. There's no sin there to merit or to feel the anger, and we can hurt, but we can't destroy His love."
Peter stopped, "That's what I saw a little this morning," he said after a minute. ”

“ Manning smiled languidly. "Well, you don't guess, that's all. It's quite simple. Perhaps there is a god; perhaps He is all that is said about Him. Perhaps.... Only we are reasonable men and we have to go upon facts, and the facts are that there is no trace of Him."
"Unless very existence is a sign—the fact that things are," said Paul, catching at a straw.
"Oh, very well, have it if you will. But of what or of whom is existence a sign? I know it's sentimental twaddle to talk of the cruelty and so on of Nature, and I won't. But you know and I know there are laws, and what sort of laws? ”

“ Cheerio, Solomon!"
They drank to each other. Then: "And love?" queried Peter softly.
Julie did not reply for a minute. She set her wine-glass down and toyed with the stem. Then she looked up at him under her eyelashes with that old daring look of hers, and repeated: "And love, Peter. But real love, not stodgy humdrum liking, Peter. I want the love that's like the hot sun, and the wide, tossing blue sea east of Suez, and the nights under the moon where the real world wakes up and doesn't go to sleep, like it does in the country in the cold, hard North. ”

“ Paul had always loved nature; he had always "been one" (as his mother would have said) for a country walk; and he had written verses to chestnut-trees in May and beech-trees in Autumn. Yet for all that, the beauty of the world had ever been a secondary thing—something you enjoyed because you were satisfied. But that morning he had come to it because he was not satisfied. And he lay now, almost immovable, introspective, peering at the tiny heather-bells, taking definite note of a fragment of moss, seeing with delight the veins of colour in the small stones. ”

“ But you're right, of course, Peter, though I hate to think of that."
"I see how we're like, and how we're unlike, Julie," said Peter suddenly, "You like real things, and so do I. You hate to feel stuffy and tied up in conventions, and so do I. But you're content with just that, and I'm not."
"Am I?" she queried, looking at him a little strangely.
Peter did not notice; he was bent on pursuing his argument. "Yes, you are," he said. "When you're in the grip of real vital things—nature naked and unashamed—you have all you want. You don't stop to think of to-morrow. You live. ”

“ Paul was staring over Ursula's shoulder at her nearly finished water-colour, and she, leaning back a little, was putting quick touches to it. Her chair was against the rail on the shady side of the boat deck; and just below, the endless procession of natives who had begun carrying coal from lighters alongside to the coal bunkers of the ship since but an hour or two after anchor had been dropped the night before, and who were still apparently as busy as ever, toiled, each man in it naked to the waist-cloth, sooty and perspiring, in the blazing sun. ”

“ That very respectability, that very conventionality, that very contented backboneless religion made it possible—all but made it necessary. For it was those things which allowed the world to drift into the war, and what the war was nine days out of ten ought to be thrust under the eyes of those who will not believe. It is a small thing that men die in battle, for a man has but one life to live and it is good to give it for one's friends; but it is such an evil that it has no like, this drifting of a world into a hell to which men's souls are driven like red maple leaves before the autumn wind. ”

“ Several thousand men and women had looked on truth in its beauty, stripped of the shams and conventionalities of orthodox religion, and the utter loveliness of it had gone straight to their hearts.
Of course, the applause had come, had grown, had begun as a breath of relief and had risen to a crescendo of tumult. People had invaded the box. The manager had gestured towards a sea of upturned faces, looking their way. Paul had gone behind, shaken hands with a sudden grateful eagerness with the men and women who had played in his success, and appeared for a moment before the curtain. ”

“ She dragged him into the bathroom and into that bath, and then she filled a sponge with cold water and trickled it on him, until he threatened to jump out and give her a cold douche. Then, panting with her exertions and dry now, she collapsed on the chair and began to fumble with her hair and its solitary rose. It was exactly Julie who sat there unashamed in her nakedness, Peter thought. She had kept the soul of a child through everything, and it could burst through the outer covering of the woman who had tasted of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and laugh in the sun. ”